St. Brigit of Kildare

Brigit and her connections to Persephone

I mentioned in my article concerning the theories of the Holy Grail that St Brigit of Kildare figures into the missing links of grail lore.  Here on this page I wish to elaborate on this. 

First off lets look at the Goddess Brigit.  She was the patron Goddess of much of the British Isles predominating over fire and smith craft mostly.  She also had many sacred healing springs dedicated to her all over the regions of the isles. She was also the Goddess of poetry and basically whenever anyone had need of anything what-so-ever, they prayed to Brigit. (pronounced "breed"), she was that important of a major deity. 

Her sacred day was February 2nd, the festival known as Imbolg which was later Christianized into the name of "Candlemas" meaning festival of lights. 

What I discovered in my researches is that Brigit as a Goddess had an older counterpart and that was Persephone.  There are some very interesting connections between these two deities just as there are some interesting connections between Persephone as an "underworld" Goddess and the grail respectively.  At first glance this doesn't make much sense and it  confused me for a long time due to the fact that these deities and themes represent two very different parts of the world at different points in history.   I began to see a very thin and subtle thread of meaning here which very likely could have been a significant factor in the migration of grail lore through the "underground stream" of ancient secret doctrines. 

The first most obvious connection between these two deities is the sacred day of February 2nd.   In the Eleusinian mysteries of Kore and Demeter we find two significant festivals.  One is held in the Spring celebrating the return of Kore from the Underworld (February 2nd) and the other is held in the fall when she makes her descent.  

The second commonality to these two great ladies of lore is that of the fire element. Brigit could be seen as the light aspect of Persephone returning from the underworld to usher in the beginning the spring.  Fire is her symbol and the growing warmth of the sun during this half of the season would have been highly symbolic, as is the fire symbolism of the underworld.

Fire  is an alchemical and underworld element as far as symbolism goes.  The connections to metal and smith crafting of Brigit give one a sense of the ancient alchemists and their art of metallurgy.  This mythological deity had somehow managed to migrate through the generations to the British Isles with the secrets of metal crafting probably from ancient times originating possibly in Egypt.    Much of alchemical symbolism predominates in grail lore as does the underworld transformational fire and rites of regeneration or eternal life which are so central to the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Kore.  Demeter it should be remembered had the power to bestow immortality by feeding a human boy the nectar of the gods with the help of the element of fire.  This is a very similar account of grail legends especially when you begin to cross them over with some tantric doctrines..   

Now then St. Brigit the human woman was an extraordinary woman who founded the famous nunnery in Kildair, Ireland.  Scholars of the more recent grail lore fairly well feel confident  that St Brigit was possibly a Nazarene and that her nunnery and her religious practices were a very removed continuation of the heretical Essene community  from the Dead Sea Region.  

The Essenes it should be noted were believed to be mystics who knew many arts in healing and metaphysical practices.  Jesus was believed to have lived in the Essene community.   As the church of the Nazarene spread, over time they became very dangerous to the power structure of the Roman Catholic Church and in Spain some of the greatest crusades against the Nazarene monasteries were responsible for the death and sacking of many of the Nazarene faith. 

It should also be noteworthy to bear in mind that St. Brigit was as legend had it, the midwife to Jesus.  Here again we have a severe time discrepancy for St. Brigit lived long after the crucifixion.  If we refer to Laurence Gardener again however we are reminded that there may have been several generations of the family of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's children.. and that the son of Mary Magdalene may have traveled to Glastonbury where the first Monastery built in the area was dedicated to her.  Her progeny would have born children and so on and so forth and many of the sons in the family line would have likely been named Jesus as well.  So it is possible in this light to consider St. Brigit may well  have been a midwife to a distant grandson, or great son of the actual Jesus a few times removed, and that progeny would have been named "Jesus" as well. This would connect her unquestionably to the secret grail tradition and knowledge of the bloodline.  Especially if she was truly a Nazarene. 

What is interesting about the Nazarene faith is that it was incredibly Druid friendly.  In the British Isles the Nazarene faith became the central religion of the Celtic Church who worshipped in groves and wooded areas very much like the Druids. It was the Celtic Church who was responsible for some of those fabulous stone Celtic crosses one sees in the middle of fabulous wooded groves.  The Druids and the Nazarenes would have gotten on with each other quite well, respecting each's traditions and probably I believe, sharing in their secret knowledge.  In this way, many of the Druid and nature symbols probably ended up in a great deal of the Cathedral masonry which the stone masons or Templars would have built.  The Masons and the Templars (whichever came first) would have also very likely had dealings with the Celtic Church and the faith of the more mystically inclined Nazarenes as they most likely all had factioned off from similar sources centuries back.   

Nazarene is should be noted is not a place.  It never was.  It is another title describing the nature of the religion of the Essene community.  Therefore the proper biblical translation according to modern grail scholars should be "Jesus THE Nazarene"  Not Jesus OF Nazareth.  There is no documented proof that suggests such a location as Nazareth ever existed in the Holy Land. 

So why the significance of Persephone to the Holy Grail?    Well I'm still searching for more information on this to be honest, but so far I have been not disappointed to find cross cultural references to the grail which suggest a maiden who always managed to find herself   kidnapped and kept underground in the land of the dead by an evil demon , or an evil abductor in a great fortress somewhere, or an otherwise association to the god of the underworld and the land of the dead, eternal island of apples, or hollow hill.

 There is perhaps a very distant migration over many hundred years in concept, of the origin of the symbolism of the goat of Mendes in ancient Egypt as a lord of the underworld symbolism.  The priest of Mendes was a metallurgist whose coat of arms symbol was a five pointed star and a goat head.  This figurehead in Egyptian history was later demonized by the Judaic people for political reasons, and he may have become deified as time went on into different morphological aspects of an underworld god which was associated with one of the most ancient secret societies associated with grail lore that we know of.  A metallurgist who is constantly saturated in fire and flames in some cave somewhere making the elixir of life, later known as the philosophers stone, OR (drum roll please....) the Holy Grail.  This is a very far reaching theory but I think there may be something to be had here if one were to really look more deeply. 

The symbol of Baphomet, the goat headed hermaphrodite has been capitalized upon by modern Satanists as well as having been a primary symbol of Templar philosophy.  The Satanic orders refer to the upside down pentagram with the goat head as the "Goat of Mendes" which was simply the original coat of arms symbol of a city called Mendes in Ancient Egypt.  It doesn't take too much reaching to make the connection with Hades Lord of the Underworld here and his lovely abducted goddess and queen.  Is it quite possible we are looking at a reference to another mysterious genealogical line of real human beings over the centuries who have hidden behind the masks of these mythical archetypes? 

The Dionysian vine is also of great interest to me in regards to grail lore as Jesus is always represented as a child of the 'vine" , the grapevine being an allegory for a family tree and its many branches.  Dionysus was quite likely a human man as well who later became deified into a myth, much like King Arthur.   If so... he probably had children as well.   Perhaps I am seeing what I want to see, but the more I began to look into the ancient myths of different parts of the world, the more I really began to believe something was afoot here.  In another article at another time I will discuss Dionysus and his rites and history. 

Persephone RC